Atelier Ryza Gets New Trailer Revealing More Story Details; Draft Character Designs Revealed

Atelier Ryza Gets New Trailer Revealing More Story Details; Draft Character Designs Revealed

Koei Tecmo released a new trailer for Atelier Ryza and revealed an unused, more mature looking character design for Ryza.

Gust and Koei Tecmo released today a new trailer for Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout. The trailer starts by showing Ryza and her friends as they leave their island and start their journey. Later on, they end up finding some kind of ruins and an artifact. Party member Lila describes it as what they need in order to save their island. The trailer also reveals Atelier Ryza‘s world has stargate-like portals connected to another world, which Ryza and her friends will be using to travel.

The second part of the trailer shows some battles, which are much more dynamic than past Atelier games. We also get to see the Alchemy system and other gameplay systems we already talked about.

Our Japanese comrades of 4Gamer also published an interview with Atelier Ryza‘s character designer Toridamono, and Producer Junzo Hosoi. Through the interview, Koei Tecmo revealed multiple draft designs for the characters of Atelier Ryza.

In particular, they revealed this design for Ryza, which looks like “older sister Ryza”. This design was the very first design Toridamono made for Ryza. At the time, Ryza’s setting wasn’t decided yet, so he drew a “farmer girl”. This design is particularly more “Atelier” than the final one. As he kept working on Ryza’s design, Toridamono fell into a slump at some point. He thought he could never grasp what they were seeking for the character. CG Director Suzuki helped him a lot to redo the design and get to the final result.

I’m not into Atelier enough to spend some time to translate the whole interview and the notes on each design. But they didn’t mention anything major besides that anyway. In any case, it’s always interesting to see in a single glance how character designs changed over development. Usually, these kinds of materials are never made public or only released in artbooks sometime after the game’s release. It’s a good opportunity to not let slip by.

Both the new Atelier Ryza trailer and the character design drafts can be found below.

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout launches on PS4 and Switch in Japan on September 26. Atelier Ryza will release only a month later in the west, on October 29, for the same platforms plus PC via Steam. You can preorder it on Amazon.

This post contains affiliate links where DualShockers gets a small commission on sales. Any and all support helps keep DualShockers as a standalone, independent platform for less-mainstream opinions and news coverage.